spinline.net: The Blog

I just stumbled across this presentation comparing venerable magazine titles’ early 20th century covers with contemporary versions. Contrast these classic covers, with minimal copy and lovingly-crafted illustrations or arresting graphics, with the style that unfortunately predominates today, with ubiquitous airbrushed, smiling celebrities overlaid by maniacally cacophonous headlines, badges, starbursts, and banners.

Look to opinion magazines like The Nation and the New Republic for a cool drink of water amid this aesthetic desert — they still manage to churn out dramatic and elegant cover art with regularity.

And even the cash-strapped American Conservative manages to present interesting and sometimes witty artwork, like this one lampooning the neoconservatives.

(I wish I could find a higher-res version of this one. It’s not an eye-popping composition, but at a larger size you could better see the pudgy pasty faces, taped-up eyeglasses, and the sexy Sarah Palin pinup.)

Of course, opinion magazines are sure-fire money-losers, and they’re less dependent on impulse supermarket buys, so the for-profit magazine world might not be looking in their direction for aesthetic inspiration. But still, is a downmarket cover art renaissance too much too hope for?

Worth a look: a gallery of postage stamps designed by famous type designers.

Over at The Corner, Mark Hemingway complains about CBS News coverage of some GOP-sponsored protesters outside an Obama rally. From the CBS article:

The Republican National Committee is sending around this Associated Press photo of overall-clad McCain supporters standing outside an Obama rally, clutching plungers and a sign proclaiming “I Am Joe The Plumber”:

The only problem? At least two of the members aren’t quite as similar to the newly famous Joe Wurzelbacher as they might like you to think. … the man on the right does say he’s an actual plumber – though he is from Melbourne, Australia … And the man on the left, plunger thrust high in the air, is Charlie Smith – the National Chairman of the College Republicans.

Hemingway moans:

Wow, thanks for the fact check CBS! Also, it turns out that not all of those guys crucified after that slave uprising were named Spartacus either.

Oh, COME ON. The guy wearing an “I Am Joe the Plumber” shirt and angrily waving a toilet plunger around as part of a supposed populist demonstration is actually the National Chairman of the Young freakin’ Republicans! That fact is more than ludicrous and hilarious enough to warrant comment from CBS News, is it not?

The nerve of CBS News, asking questions about a PR photo of a bullcrap staged Astroturf GOP rally!

But the Republicans are being more honest than they realize by pushing this photo. Doesn’t this crude sham-populism perfectly encapsulate the direction the McCain campaign has taken since the addition of Palin to the ticket?  Let’s make the National Young Republican Chairman in a plumber’s outfit the new GOP mascot!

Apple has been granted a patent on the “Dock,” the application-launching thingamajig on Mac OS. That’s nice for them, but the Dock still sucks.

UPDATE: notice that in the linked news.com article, the picture caption describes the dock as being “in the controversial left position.” Is that a joke? If not: people, that’s the best thing you can think of to have a controversy about? There’s an election! There’s a war going on! Western civilization is collapsing! E-mail me for more suggestions.

Blackberry is set to release an iPhone competitor with a large touchscreen and a new innovation: the screen is actually a button that clicks when you press on it.

I doubt that its UI is a match for the iPhone, but that clicking screen seems like a genuinely useful innovation. One of the most unfortunate user-experience tradeoffs of the iPhone’s use of its touchscreen for nearly all aspects of its operation is that hitting those icons gives no meaningful, immediate feedback to the user, as a physical button would. Some buttons emit a glow when they are in their “pressed” state, but first, it’s easy for this kind of visual feedback to become obscured by your finger, and second, that still doesn’t tell you whether the iPhone has registered your “click.” If you press a button and nothing happens immediately, you can’t tell if your gesture didn’t correctly register as a button press, or if the iPhone is just taking a long time to bring you to the next step.

But besides that—and the difficult-to-use onscreen keyboard—the iPhone is pretty awesome.

The Atlantic has a unveiled a spiffy redesign of their magazine and Web site. The design, by the venerable design house Pentagram, is built around a revival of their midcentury logo.

It’s very a mod 60′s-retro design, which in my opinion we’re going to be seeing a lot more of in the next few years. (spinline.net: The Blog leads the way!)

For maximum aesthetic consistency the new Atlantic Monthly should be read in a room like this:

60sPopArtFurniture07 (flickr) Originally uploaded by modern_fred

The Gmail logo is a travesty. Was it designed by a committee of seven-year-olds?